> 64k Strings Hack - Does it work or not?

[blueznl]

no, it would stop 99.9% of the complaints

[Karbon]

hahahaha

TRUE!

[Kale]

This hack does not work with all PB function as pointed out by Danilo here:
viewtopic.php?t=9194

[Karbon]

Yea - that's just the kind of thing I was afraid of...

Ohhhh Freddy Fred... Do you consider that a bug?

[freak]

Raising the limit is imho not neccesary.
Most program do not even need 64k of string length (i only hit that limit
once, through a bug in my program ), so why waste the memory like
that?

If you just want to write a little tool, that displays one or two words in it's
gui, you don't want it to use 10 megs of ram because of that.

Timo

[fweil]

...,

Indieed most of the time allcatememory is good enough to load a full file in memory, parse it, and free it after keeping the part you need.

I do not consider long strings as a real requirement, as a bypass exists, and when we, all programers I mean, use strings, it is most of the time to parse lines. And lines are not so much often long enough.

Maybe one good Purebasic's add would be to create a 'regular' library to have an alternative to FindString and StringField Purebasic commands for long strings.

Well ... on my own I actually use the 'string equivalence' tip I have :

Code: Select all

Structure StringBytes
  Bytes.b[64000]
EndStructure

String.s = "whatever you want"

  *MyString1.StringBytes = @String ; PokeB(@String, PeekS(@String))

This makes possible to request either a string part using String variable or

Code: Select all

*MyString\Bytes[index]

to evaluate a single byte.

This is very fast and useful.

[Karbon]

Raising the limit is imho not neccesary.
Most program do not even need 64k of string length (i only hit that limit
once, through a bug in my program ), so why waste the memory like
that?

If you just want to write a little tool, that displays one or two words in it's
gui, you don't want it to use 10 megs of ram because of that.

Timo

Ok, I'm back to being confused again.

How would raising the possible upper limit of strings cause more memory to be used? It's already been said (and I've assumed said correctly) that you only see more memory usage if you actually use the space. So a 10k string still only takes 10k of memory - even if it's *possible* to write 5 megs of data into that same string..

[Karbon]

Ok, now that fr34k smacked me around a little bit on IRC I get it...

because PB always allocates a fixed buffer for string manipulation

It will only allocate that buffer once, but it still allocates it. So increasing the limit to 10 megs would mean that a one time allocation of 10 megs of memory would be made when your exe starts up

But...

<fr34k> Windows does that kind of smart though.. if you request a 100mb buffer and only use the first 10 byte, it will only allocate 10 byte, and increase that buffer if you need more. Other OS don't do that though

... so there is hope yet (at least for we single platform developers).

Gotcha... Thanks to everyone!

[fweil]

Karbon,

If you check it with the code I posted @ viewtopic.php?t=10760, you will see that only used string is consumed, but it does not mean exactly this byte to byte as paging using W32 is 64K based AFAIK.

Rgrds